Summer isn’t slowing down for the MMORPG genre: This week, we saw Daybreak haul one – and just one – of the EverQuest emulators into court, accusing it of copyright infringement and forcing its apparent profits into a court-approved escrow account while the lawsuit proceeds.

Meanwhile, Funcom is shocked – shocked! – to find out that Dune Awakening players didn’t really want the gankbox endgame Funcom had prepared for them, so the studio is pretty much walking it back.

Plus, Hytale went up in flames, and we got hands on with Sea of Remnants, Towerborne, and Diablo Immortal’s new Druid class.

Become a PatronRead on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday (since 2010!) in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

Funcom is retooling Dune Awakening’s PvP endgame to be more PvE-friendly after all - Dune Awakening is on the move, fam, and Funcom doesn't mean to let anyone forget it. This morning, the studio released a launch infographic calling the game Funcom's fastest-selling to… Judge approves order mandating EverQuest emu The Heroes Journey halt content and put profits in escrow - Earlier this week, we covered the eyebrow-raising news that Daybreak was suing EverQuest emulator server The Heroes Journey in a California court. As we noted, Daybreak (fka SOE) has a… Daybreak is chasing EverQuest emulator operators from The Heroes Journey in court - Never let it be said that nobody cares about classic EverQuest: Half a dozen readers tipped us last night about a legal mess brewing over in the world of ancient… Riot’s Minecraft-inspired Hytale MMORPG has been canceled – its studio is closing too - If you can remember just four months ago, MOP's Chris did some digging into Hytale, an MMORPG whose development we'd been covering since 2018. Readers might recall that it was… First Impressions: Sea of Remnants is a curious, colorful, and utterly confusing bit of MMO gaming - You know when you see trailers or images for a game and you think that it looks too good or too nice to be true? That's kind of where I… ‘Political, dynamic, and unapologetically brutal’: Early impressions of Dune Awakening - I stood there almost naked, staring across the desert the north as my hydration quickly dropped. I had no gear and no base and a huge expanse of worm-ridden desert… The best MMO and multiplayer deals from Steam’s summer sale and beyond - I usually put a pithy line or two snarking about the annual Steam summer sale in this post, but this year, I can't bring myself to do it because for… RIFT’s datamined patch has officially gone live with Summerfest minion missions and a small list of fixes - "The RIFT patch actually went live when they said it would. My brain hurts," remarks our tipster for this story. And indeed the confusion is understandable, but it's true: The… Embers Adrift ‘completes its full launch’ on Steam while touting past year’s progress - It's a launch day of sorts for indie fantasy MMO Embers Adrift, which today completes its full migration to Steam. The release comes alongside a patch that includes new gear… WoW Factor: Is World of Warcraft flooding us with too much content? - The awful periods when World of Warcraft suffered from extensive content droughts still existing in living memory: Typically, these were lengthy stretches of time prior to an expansion's launch when… ‘We have lost players to the way we approach microtransactions’: RuneScape plans huge monetization overhaul - If you're looking for a reason to be distracted from the fact that Jagex leadership made the deeply unpopular decision to prevent RuneScape's devs from fully celebrating Pride this year… The new Star Trek Online, Champions Online, and Neverwinter Discords that will displace the forums are here - Back in May, players of Cryptic's old MMORPGs jacked their grumpiness levels up to 11 at the news that their games' new operators at DECA Games planned to do away… Interview: Chatting with Knut Avenstroup Haugen, the genius behind the music of Dune Awakening - If you are like many MMO players, you will eventually, if not immediately, turn off the music to your game as you are playing. In fact, in most of the… Chrono Odyssey confirms restrictions to limit ‘strange and uncomfortable’ player-created characters - When players get their hands on character creators in an MMORPG, they're often going to go buck wild if given the ability to do so. Chrono Odyssey has found this… Hands-on with Diablo Immortal’s newly announced Druid class, launching July 3 - As of this morning, Blizzard has taken the wraps of its newest class for Diablo Immortal: the Druid. The Druid joins the existing stable of eight other classes, bringing the… Massively Overthinking: How many MMO alts is too many? - A few weeks back, I asked our readers how they manage their MMORPG alts (the joke being the LOTRO player who said "log out of one and log into the… LOTRO Legendarium: LOTRO’s Midsummer island is a charming addition to the festival roster - Summer in Lord of the Rings Online never seems to arrive until the old Summer Festival or Farmer's Faire finally kicks in. Even the previous iteration of the Midsummer Festival… Adorable VR MMORPG Eldramoor launched a $25,000 Kickstarter that’s already funded - Back in April, we first covered a new-to-us MMORPG: Eldramoor, a virtual reality title that reminded us more of OrbusVR than anything. And now, it's officially launched on Kickstarter -… Square Enix acknowledges Final Fantasy XIV’s dip in quality and overextending Yoshi-P - Many fans of Final Fantasy XIV appear to have clung to admissions from producer and director Naoki Yoshida during the recent live letter about missed quality targets and some dropped… Fight or Kite: Old-school side-scrolling beat-’em-ups have finally arrived for MMO gamers in Towerborne - Let me take you back in time. It was the early 1990s, and videos games were super and rollerblades were so rad. A cute, bright-eyed boy spent hours upon hours… RuneScape Dragonwilds community Q&A says Jagex is aiming to double the map size - Following a state of the game and roadmap earlier this month in which the Jagex team said that it wasn't going anywhere, survival sandbox RuneScape Dragonwilds produced a community question-and-answer… Gachapwned: The lesson a failed gacha game’s offline version teaches about gacha games - In 2020, Capcom launched a mobile gacha game based on Mega Man X titled Mega Man X DiVE. The title was primarily developed by a Taiwan-based studio, and so you might think… Project Ghost highlights the hand-crafted nature of its ‘red zones’ - If there's one thing that's kind of confusing when approaching Fantastic Pixel Castle's Project Ghost MMO, it's that the studio keeps using the terms "blue zones" and "red zones" like… Black Desert adds a new PvP dragon on PC, moves to current gen on console, holds an unlimited class change event on mobile - How can you strike fear in the hearts of your PvP foes in Black Desert? Why, rock up on top of a big angry dragon of course. We're hard pressed… Hearthstone is adding its first in-game pet, but you get it only with a gacha pull mechanic - Hearthstone is setting up a pet adoption agency in its game -- but it may cost you more than you'd like. [AL:Hearth]The digital trading card game announced that it's adding… Warframe of Mind: Warframe’s Isleweaver is an awfully thin update - I have been looking forward to Isleweaver pretty much since the moment that it was announced. It struck me as a little bit surprising as a direction to go; sure,… PSA: Champions Online will apparently end 32-bit operating system support next week - The inexorable march of time appears to be coming for the tech that's powering Champions Online, as one player is sharing a screenshot of a popup (archived here on the… Dune Awakening begins the process of pivoting to a more PvE-friendly endgame with today’s update - Following the recent furor over a heavy PvP endgame design and subsequent developer change of mind, Dune Awakening delivered its Patch 1.1 today with a much more friendly PvE endgame… Whatever happened to the WoW-inspired MMORPG Scars of Honor? - We appreciate that it's been a while since we reported on Scars of Honor, the WoW-like MMORPG in development from Beast Burst Entertainment that we started covering in 2024 when… Diablo IV’s Sins of the Horadrim transgresses our way on July 1st - You best put your affairs in order, for you may not be long for this realm. Diablo IV is bringing its next chapter to bear against you and yours on… Fortnite now has its own garden-growing clicker game because of course it does - Never let it be said that Epic Games isn't willing to leap on the shiniest bandwagon out there. Readers will no doubt recall that Roblox has been making headlines thanks… ‘Sling webs and cling to walls’: Warframe launches Isleweaver with its creepy spiderframe Oraxia - Spiderframe, Spiderframe, does whatever a Spider- OK, doesn't rhyme, but the Spiderframe is indeed live today in Warframe's Isleweaver update. "Warframe’s next major update, Isleweaver, is now available for free… Perfect Ten: 10 MMOs that have fun with dinosaurs - A great perk of being an MMORPG developer is indulging in your inner child's greatest fantasies. Been a life-long fan of pirates or ninjas? You can toss those into your… Little Orbit says it is finally ‘close’ to reopening Fallen Earth after nearly five months offline - To those not tallying up the days, Fallen Earth Classic has been offline nearly five months since server problems forced Little Orbit to take the post-apocalyptic MMO and its sister… PSO2 New Genesis teases its new 32-player mission type and the rest of 2025’s planned content - With the month of July winding down (and the remainder of this month's update being literally nothing but new lockbox items), it's time for fans of Phantasy Star Online 2:… Lost Ark’s stylebook is finally live in the west along with major raid nerfs and a new island - It's patch day for Lost Ark players! Or it was patch night. Amazon patches at weird times. The servers went down at 5 a.m. EDT this morning and returned just… War Thunder fans leak classified documents in the forums to win an argument, again, this time over the Harrier Jump Jet - Oh, War Thunder fans. At this point it has to be a thing, right? Look, the AV-8B and TAV-8B Harrier are both really cool jets with VTOL capabilities, and they are… Choose My Adventure: Using the polls to take on untouched mission types in Elite Dangerous - Most of the time when I ask for pollsters to guide me to tasks in Choose My Adventure, it's just for that purpose: guidance, direction, and a general understanding of… Blade & Soul NEO releases the Warlock class and issues another round of DDoS compensation - It's time for players of Blade & Soul NEO to charm, shackle, and throw a demon at their combative problems today as the MMORPG has officially released the Warlock class… World of Warcraft’s Patch 11.2 will be the last major War Within update - World of Warcraft: The War Within isn't long for this world, but it's going to make a big splash before it exits the stage in favor of next year's Midnight.… Wisdom of Nym: Thoughts on the first live letter for Final Fantasy XIV’s The Promise of Tomorrow patch - Sometimes I have to feel like the team is calling me out specifically when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV's live letters. After some back-and-forth speculation, this live letter just said… Blizzard readies bigger World of Warcraft: Midnight reveal at Gamescom 2025 - When Summer Games Fest came and went without a hoped-for reveal of World of Warcraft's next expansion pack, all eyes turned to August's Gamescom for Blizzard's big announcement, especially considering… Chrono Odyssey’s beta draws in 65K players on Steam, mixed reception, and comparisons to New World - Were you among those inside of this past weekend's beta test for Chrono Odyssey? Then you're counted among thousands and very possibly have Opinions on the title, as players swarmed… Massively on the Go: Pokemon GO’s July events should keep the Go Fest party going - Pokemon Go may be having Go Fest 2025 around this time, but the July 2025 events haven't been forgotten. Well, not all of them; as of this writing, Scopely's POGO team… Throne & Liberty’s Calanthia 12-person raid is live with new heroic gear drops and craftables - Throne and Liberty fans are marching toward their death and/or their delight today as the Calanthia 12-person raid has officially opened its doors. "Vanquish Calanthia before her dream becomes a… Riot Games confirms sports betting sponsorships for its League of Legends and Valorant esports tournaments - The sponsorship banners for the next major League of Legends and Valorant esports tournaments are going to look a bit different this year, as Riot Games has officially announced that… Hytale’s former devs paint a picture of executives’ mismanagement, needless reinvention, and overambition - Earlier this week we had the unfortunate duty to report that Hytale, the Minecraft-like MMORPG being developed by Riot Games-owned Hypixel Studios, was fully cancelled along with its studio being…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Massively OP Podcast Episode 523: Course-correcting into the future The Stream Team: Taking a peek at Palworld’s latest Terraria-filled update The Stream Team: Acute Delirium in DDO’s Reign of Madness The Stream Team: Backseat Streaming hits the ground for some on-foot Elite Dangerous missions The Stream Team: Facing the consequences of a choice in MechWarrior 5 Clans The Stream Team: Guild Wars 2’s Dragon Bash has gone to the birds The Stream Team: Hoarding pizza and beer to hang out in Warframe’s newest bar The Stream Team: Welcoming insects in Planet Crafter Every week, get caught up on the MMO genre’s latest news and Massively OP’s best content in our MMO Week in Review! Want more roundups of content? Try Friday’s Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s The MOP Up, which mops up all the bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.